Zhang Xiaogang was born in 1958 in Kunming, Yunnan. He graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1982 and majored in oil painting. He currently lives and works in Beijing. As one of China's most internationally influential artists, Zhang’s practice constantly interrogates the ideas of constructed identity and fabricated memory. Through narrative scenes, his paintings, rooted in personal experience and memory, articulate perception, stories, and emotions. He reorganizes and juxtaposes images from history and perception, collective memories, and personal reminiscences, actively bringing the past into the present. Since the 1990s, Zhang has employed flinty, restrained, and daydreamy visual language to convey collective psychological memories and emotions characteristic of the times. This paradoxical presentation and mimesis of society, the collective, the individual, as well as family and blood relations, serve as a reinterpretation from the perspectives of art, emotion, and life, which holds strong contemporary significance and encapsulates the local contexts in the realm of the contemporary art.
Zhang Xiaogang's works have been exhibited in major museums and institutions such as the National Art Museum of China (Beijing), the Sao Paulo Biennial (Sao Paulo, 1994), the Venice Biennale (Venice, 1995), the Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland, 1996), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), the Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, 2000), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the M+ Art Museum (Hong Kong), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne0, the Louis Vuitton Art Center (Paris), the Taikang Art Museum (Beijing), the West Bund Art Museum (Shanghai), the Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou), the Xihai Art Museum (Qing Dao), the Star Art Museum (Shanghai), the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), the Song Art Museum (Beijing), the Minsheng Art Museum (Beijing), the Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou), the Powerlong Art Museum (Shanghai), the Ulsan Art Museum (Ulsan), and the Pingshan Art Museum (Shenzhen). His solo exhibitions have been held at the Sarahilden Museum (Finland), the Queensland Art Gallery (Australia), the Daegu Art Museum (South Korea), the Prague City Art Museum (Czech Republic), the Today Art Museum (Beijing), the Long Museum (Shanghai), the Kunming Contemporary Art Museum (Kunming), the Fosun Art Center (Chengdu), the Wuhan United Art Museum (Wuhan), the Hubei Art Museum (Wuhan), the Beijing Commune (Beijing), and the Pace Gallery (New York, Hong Kong, Beijing). His works are also collected by important institutions and individuals such as Museum of Modern Art (New York), Guggenheim Museum (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), Asia Pacific Museum (San Francisco), Tate Modern (London), Pompidou Centre (Paris), Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris), M+ (Hong Kong), Fukuoka Art Museum (Fukuoka, Japan), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the White Rabbit Gallery (Sydney), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), the Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul), the Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), the Taikang Art Museum (Beijing), the Shanghai Art Museum (Shanghai), the Yuz Museum (Shanghai), the Long Museum (Shanghai), the Fosun Art Center (Shanghai), and the He Xiangning Art Museum (Shenzhen).
